What
to do about it? Throw all planning out the window and just improvise your way
through life?

Strange as it may seem, I found the answer to this
dilemma within the Alexander Technique and the whole “Posture” issue.

The
answer: keep calm and remember your direction.

Allow me to break that up for you.

KEEP CALM

When Real Life meets my Pretty Plan and proceeds to run
amuck with it, my first reaction is to go into a frenzy trying to patch it up.
Useless. I’m stuck in tunnel-vision running in circles, fixing irrelevant bits
and forgetting the most important part.

Take
90 seconds and breathe. In out, in out, in out. The world IS
NOT coming to an end and all the terrible things you’re imagining right now don’t
necessarily need to happen. You cannot appraise the whole situation if you’re already
doing stuff about it.

REMEMBER YOUR DIRECTION

Once I get my heart-rate down, I can give my higher
cognitive powers a chance to help out. I may be very upset about my ruined
perfect-plan, but perhaps I can still salvage the most important bits.

What
was the main objective of your plan? Where was it taking you? Is there another
way to get there?

Once you know where you were going (and why you were
going there in the first place) you can improvise other ways of getting to your
destination. This is where your original preparation comes in really handy.

If you’ve been planning and preparing for so long, you
really know your stuff, so you can re-shuffle the information to make it fit the
changing circumstances.

This is true improvisation. It is using all your
cognitive and intuitive abilities, and your full stash of experience and
preparation, to respond to something in the NOW. You’re not trying to squeeze
the situation into a pre-made mold (the perfect plan) but neither are you being
blown about by the winds of change.

How
does this relate to posture?

Perfect
Posture is like my Perfect Plan: useless when confronted with real life. There
is no One Posture to fit all situations.

I cannot tell you something like “your head should always
be here, and your shoulders there, and keep your pelvis thus, and avoid doing
this with your leg”, because chances are Life will put you eventually in some situation
where you’ll need to break all or some of those rules.

You’ll keep calm because you’ll know that you will eventually
get out of this situation that requires such a terrible deviation from the
golden-mean of perfect alignment; so there’s really nothing to fret about.

And you’ll remember your direction: good posture is about creating space.
So your objective in this oh-so-uncomfortable-situation is to create as much
space for yourself as you can, given the circumstances, and then enjoy the
show.

If you’ve been taking Alexander Technique lessons you
probably know all about creating space within your body; you’ve been practicing
it at every lesson! You’re well prepared to improvise.